Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

anyway such things are usually not repeatable. But what if you asked me a question, and hearing no answer were unable to ask it again? This possibility tormented me at a later time, when I wanted to give you every hoped-for answer.
    We both trembled. We barely managed it, being overcome—both of us, both of us—with gratitude, and amazement. The flood of luck, of happiness undeserved, unqualified, nearly unbelieved-in. Tears stood in our eyes. Undeniably. Yes.
    If you had been a man I had met that day, or at that time in my life, could I have loved you? Not so much. I don’t think so. Not so much. I loved you for linking me with my past, with my young self pushing the stroller along the campus paths, innocent through no fault of my own. If I could kindle love then and take it now there was less waste than I had thought. Much less than I had thought. My life did not altogether fall away in separate pieces, lost.

    I decide to leave, then, on the first of May. I have almost two months free before any child comes home to me, before summer school starts. I fly to the city where I have all this time been sending my letters. My joyful letters, my chattering and confiding letters, my apprehensive and finally begging letters. Where I would still be sending them, if I had not been clever enough to take note of your death.
    The city where you lived, which you described to me wryly, but on the whole contentedly, in your letters. Full of old crocks and bewildered tourists, you said. No. Full of old crocks, like me , you said, making yourself out as usual to be older than you were. You loved to do that, to pretend to be tired and lazy, to stress your indifference. I thought it a pose, to tell you the truth. What I could not credit, did not have the imagination to credit, was that it might be real. You told me once that you did not care at all whether you died soon or went on living for another twenty-five years. Blasphemy from a lover. You told me that you did not think about happiness, the word did not occur to you. What pomposity, I thought, taking such things as if a young man had said, them, unwilling to strain myself to understand a man for whom these statements were flat truth, in whom some energy I expected to find was worn down or entirely forgotten. Though I had stopped dyeing my hair and learned to live, as I thought, with a decent level of expectation, I did send hope in your direction, gigantic hope. I refused, I refuse, to see you as you seemed to see yourself.
    I do think of you I suppose as a warm and sentient flood , you wrote one time to me, and I have the normal human concerns with being overwhelmed, which is what floods do .
    I wrote back that I was nothing but the tamest little creek you could go wading in. You knew better.
    How I tried to charm and mislead you, by that time, both in my letters and when we were together! Half my concern in love became how to disguise love, to make it harmless and merry. What humiliating charades those were. And you, you would smile in a certain way, a gentle way; I think you were a good deal ashamed for me.
    I find an apartment building close to the sea, a building dating I should think from the Twenties, creamy yellow stucco with flaking windowsills, blank medallion and indecipherable scroll above the door. Many old people, as you told me, walking past in the dazzling sea-light. I go out into the streets and walk everywhere. I don’t bother to go to the cemetery. I don’t know which cemetery it would be, in any case. I walk on sidewalks you may have walked on and look at things you almost certainly looked at. Windows which hosted your reflection give me back mine. It is a game. This city I find quite different from the cities I am used to. The steep streets, the pale stucco houses, so many of them flat-roofed and built in that strange filling-station style called “modern” before the Second World War. Oblong ornamental windows of thick glass bricks. Sometimes a Spanish roof, or misplaced portholes and decks. The famous gardens. Rhododendrons, azaleas, hydrangeas, in red and orange and purple colors that hurt the eyes. Tulips big as goblets, endless showing-off. And the shops so strange to anyone from an industrial/university town, someone used, in spite of shopping-center dress-ups, to some commercial modesty and functionalism. Turn-of-the-century ice-cream parlors. WILD WEST SPORTING GOODS. HAWAIIAN CASUALS , with palms in tubs. Tudor teashops with flimsy gables.